Youre

BY SYLVIA PLATH

Clownlike, happiest on your hands,

Feet to the stars, and moon-skulled,
Gilled like a fish. A common-sense
Thumbs-down on the dodos mode.
Wrapped up in yourself like a spool,
Trawling your dark as owls do.
Mute as a turnip from the Fourth
Of July to All Fools Day,
O high-riser, my little loaf.
Vague as fog and looked for like mail.
Farther off than Australia.
Bent-backed Atlas, our traveled prawn.
Snug as a bud and at home
Like a sprat in a pickle jug.
A creel of eels, all ripples.
Jumpy as a Mexican bean.
Right, like a well-done sum.
A clean slate, with your own face on.
Sylvia Plath, Youre from Collected Poems. Copyright 1960, 1965, 1971, 1981 by the Estate of Sylvia Plath. Editorial matter
copyright 1981 by Ted Hughes. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

To give the background of this poem, Edward Butscher, a self-indulgently passionate biographer, says, When
they actually moved into the Chalcot Square flat, however, on February 1, they had to confront the familiar
tedious chores of transforming an empty apartment into a home. This time they had the additional problem of
doing so under siege in a structure which was not yet finished. Various workmen were constantly hammering
away inside and outside, erecting scaffolds, discovering flaws in the walls, fixing pipes, and in general
interrupting their sleep and work patterns day and night. P
hysically exhausted from their search and the whole bother of moving, the Hugheses were too tired to do
anything the first few days but rest and reflect upon their good fortune, go out to eat, and take long walks in the
park. When they did begin fixing up the flat, the first thing Ted and Sylvia did was to cover the
ugly floorboards in the kitchen, bathroom, and hallway with marble-black linoleum. It was easy to wash and
kept out some of the many drafts that entered the flat despite the new walls and window frames.
The floorboards in the bedroom and parlor, which were badly scratched, were covered with three layers of paint.
Other improvements included painting the walls white and buying a big double bed, agas stove, and a
refrigerator. The Merwins kindly loaned them tables, chairs, and some china from their attic until Ted and
Sylvia could buy their own in secondhand shops; and Ted put two huge bookcases in the alcove off the parlor.
He also made two chairs for himself and Sylvia, which they frequently had to carry around as the stream of
workmen flowed in and out of the flatall this causing Sylvia to compare their situation to that of the hero in
Teds short story Snow, where an unnamed madman imagines he has crashed in the arctic and has only his
chair to keep him sane and in contact with the past.
But after a couple of hectic weeks the workmen departed and Sylvia, who had been too exhausted to write,
settled down into the routines of home-making that always soothed her. Soon she would feel strong enough to
return to poetry, although she would write only one poem, Youre, before the baby arrived in April.
The flat was cozy, if still too chilly at times; and it had the advantage of much airy space and light.
The kitchen in back was sunny for the most part, and the parlor had two large windows overlooking the square.
And although the bathroom was tiny, the hallway was big enough for a bureau. The third-floor location gave
Sylvia a sense of peaceful detachment from the outside world. Above her in the attic dwelled an old woman
artista rent-control tenant who could not be moved out and who lived, according to Sylvia, on gin and
pineapple juice. Sylvia reacted with unkind distaste to the idea of the old womans flat being buried under
twenty years of accumulated detritus amid endless pots of rainbow hyacinths.
The greatest drawback of the flat was its lack of an extra room for the baby. Sylvia wrote to Marcia that the
baby would thus have to sleep with them, Freud and Spock to the contrary, since it would be at least two
years before they could consider finding a larger place. Teds Guggenheim was stretched thin already and
money remained a major difficulty. Not too surprisingly, the baby preoccupied her. She was uneasy and tense,
though convinced it would be a strong baby boy. They had registered too late with the National Health
Service for that organization to locate a free hospital bed for her, and she would have to have the baby at home
with the help of a midwifethe very term midwife went against her entire American background.
Fortunately, Dido Merwin had introduced Sylvia to her own doctor, John Wigg, who put her in the care of his
youngassistant, whom Sylvia found both attractive and capable. He promised to stand by in the event she
needed him during the actual delivery, and she went to relaxation classes at a clinic to prepare for her ordeal.
Her mothers warning against natural childbirth still haunted her, but she was relieved somewhat when told she
would be given whiffs of anesthesia and other mild sedation to help lessen the pain.
Sylvia was also comforted by the fact that she would not have to spend twelve long days in the hospital, which
was standard practice in England at the time, and could have Ted at her side throughout. Also she was provided
with a free pint of milk each day, and received reduced prices on milk and medicines at the stores. Economy
was important, and Sylvia looked with ironic humor upon the reality that the baby whose conception she had
had to pay for was going to be delivered free. The baby itself as idea and approaching fact was another matter.
Myron Lotz, who had returned to Oxford, visited her before April and remembers that she had this fantastic

premonition and fear that the child would be born dead, with the umbilical cord around its neck, a horrible fear
of the death of her child. And yet he also recalls that she seemed reasonably well adjusted to the entire
pregnancy.
Of course, for a pregnant woman to have harbored such fears is hardly abnormal. Yet Lotz (now a doctor)
unhesitatingly labelled Sylvias fear as definitely pathological. This raises again the spectre of Sylvias
obsession with dead infant skulls and her consistent linkage of babies with sterility and death itself. It also
summons up thepossibility of a deep, carefully repressed feeling of hostility towards the unborn child.
At best, Sylvia had always been ambiguous about childbirth, and the addition of another obstacle between her
and her art had to have instigated many moments of intense, if hidden, despair. There was a life growing inside
her, and that life threatened her own both literally and figuratively. But the event itself remained essential, as
she well knew, as well as positive and wonderfully normal in its own right. Later, after Frieda and Nicholas
were born, Sylvia would desire more and more childrenreasserting an earlier determination to breed a race of
giants.
For now, things were less certain. But her time and energy, perhaps fortunately, were too engaged for much
quiet reflection or anxiety. She ran the flat efficiently and calmly, did the cooking and laundry, and continued to
send out Teds and her own manuscripts. Her only real regret was that she would have the baby in England,
away from her mother and close friends like Marcia. And economic difficulties lessened somewhat when Teds
first book, The Hawk in the Rain, was given the 1960 Somerset Maugham Award. They planned to use the
money for a three-month trip to southern Europe either that winter or the next.
Sylvias work, too, earned some money for them. Before she left Yorkshire, she had been told by Olwyn about a
contest being sponsored by The Critical Quarterly, which had been receptive to Teds poetry. She submitted a
poem called Medallion, which had probably been written several months earlier, and was notified in January
that she and another poet, Alan Brownjohn, were to divide the prize. Her share came to nearly eight pounds. The
poem saw print later in the year in a slim supplement, Poetry 1960: An Appetiser, appearing in the back section
under Prize Poems, while Teds Hawk Roosting was included in Poems of the i95os, along with pieces
by Philip Larkin, R. S. Thomas, Thorn Gunn, and others.
As the babys kicks could not be entirely ignored, Sylvias imagination was poked into action. Youre is
nothing more than a strand of associative responses to the reality of a foetus, but its art is certain and fascinating
to contemplate. Addressed to the unborn babe, it begins with an exterior description that sees the bud as already
born, Clownlike, happiest on your hands; but then it turns inward and remains a portrait of an unborn child:
Feet to the stars, and moon-skulled,/ Gilled like a fish. Sylvias ambiguity about the foetus is evident in the
odd mixture of the horrific and the whimsicalas in the connection between her own childs head and those
moon-barren skulls glowing in a hospital jar. Dodo, spool, owl, turnip are the images in the first stanza and
these lead to a touching climax of O high-riser, my little loafa play upon the old expression, one in the
oven. Sylvia then returns to the idea of foetus as fishour travelled prawn (a reference to the Hugheses
recent trip through America and back to England)which homes Like a sprat in a pickle jug. This jar,
however, has none of the terror of a specimen jar. It contains not something that is still and dead, but rather A
creel of eels, all ripples. In the end, a mathematical image brings the playful sequence to an appropriate close:
Right, like a well-done sum./ A clean slate, with your own face on.
Youre is essentially a joyous celebration of the life process, that other extreme of natures order which helps
make the reality of Medallion bearable. In it the poet gambols through her own field of talent without care for
the fatal pits she knows are still there. Sylvia herself was generally happy as the birth approached, and that
sense of joyful expectation was intensified when the publishing firm of William Heinemann accepted The
Colossus for fall publication. At last she would have a book in print and could legitimately bear the title of poet.
Book and child were dual symbols of important completions in the autobiography Sylvia Plath was carving
from experience. They were also proof that she could maintain two supposedly antagonistic roles, those of

mother and poet, and thereby create life as well as literature. And her husbands book, Lupercal, also appeared
in England just before the birth. This too was taken as another sign of achievement and essential success. Not
only did it appear, but it got excellent reviews and transformed Ted Hughes into a major figure in British poetry.
Soon he and Sylvia would be introduced to Londons literary set and be taken up by Eliot and Spender.
CRITICAL APPROACHES
The most underexplored dilemma of contemporary feminism is the womans personal identity crisis, the
recognition that the self, bound as it is by the facts of the world, may, despite our best intentions, remain
inarticulate, lost. To insist on responding to this crisis simply with the removal of the self from any of its earthly
entanglements is both reductive and arrogant. It is our responsibility at this point to question more rigorously
the implication that we ought to-or can-be through, as Plath so famously was. Confronted with too
complicated a web of opportunities-a snug bed, doting parents, and forms of chauvinism grown too subde to be
conclusively called out-young women, at present, are understandably tempted to prefer the smoke and mirrors
of self-pitying mystifications to a genuine analysis of a womans many restraints and possibilities. However,
such mystifications ultimately prove to be as silencing as the conventions they purport to overturn.
There is no definte word of baby in the poem, however it becomes obvious to the reader. It is talking about an
unborn baby, O high-riser, my little loaf implies the baby is growing inside her as bread grows in an oven.
There is a clever change of the saying snug as a bug which has been transformed to snug as a bud. A creel of
eels is describing the baby wriggling inside her and jumpy as a mexican bean. The womb is a pickle jar. The
baby is offten reffered to as an equatic creature, eels, prawn and fish. Plath compares its precence to global
space, farther off than Australia. A clean slate is showing the baby will be new and be its own person. Plaths
travelled prawn must stay in its pickle jar, snug as a bud until it is ready to leave.
Thumbs-down on the dodos mode
While the imagery points to an unborn baby, I find myself coming back to the fact that one of Plaths children
was born on All Fools Day.
This means that either Plath was a really good guesser or she composed the poem with hindsight after her baby
was born.
SOME EXCERPTS FROM MATERIAL ON YOURE
Form of a dramatic monologue, the speaker is addressing an implied listener, in this instant it is the mother
addressing her unborn child.
There are 2 stanzas symbol of two stages in pregnancy,
9 lines in each stanza - 9 months gestation period.
The title has to be placed in front of each phrase, the title is also a contraction of the verb you are contraction
links with pregnancy and the poet acknowledges her unborn childs existence.
The poem is clearly about a young child, who has been born. Every line she writes is full of description that
follow on from the title youre. She describes the childs moon-like face, big owl-like eyes, and the way the
child crawls around, preferring her hands to her feet. At the end of the poem, she says how the child has a clean
slate, and says how she is unique, by saying, with your face- note how she says your instead of youre, for the
fist time in the poem.

The poem is a collection of homely similes that she uses to describe her unborn child in her womb. There is a
childlike amusement in these similes, it seems that she is almost caressing her child and at the same time proud
of her creation. In a loving manner she sketches the childs moon like face with big owl like eyes. His posture
in the womb is as his feet are in upward direction to the stars with thumbs down like that of dodo. The child is
quite safe and enjoying the warmth and comfort of his cozy abode,
Snug as a bud and at home
He is almost cocooned in that place like a spool. At number of places Plath compares the child with
fish--Gilled like a fish, sprat, eel--kept or canned in the womb which is also symbolised by pickle jug
or creel. In this cocoon the child is moving like Mexican bean producing ripples and at the same time
growing as a loaf. Despite such clear cut similes Plath insists that every thing is as vague as fog and to see
the reality she has to wait long from Fourth Of July to All Fools Day (nine months of pregnancy period)
which seems as far off as Australia. Still she waits impatiently like a much awaited mail. Interestingly nothing
will be written in that mail, it will be a clean slate. But still it means the world to her which is again
symbolised by Atlas with the world over his shoulders. It is clear that her child has already given her a lot of
pleasure. Indeed she is very satisfied, Right, like a well done sum. At last she feels complete and has feeling
of existing, of being alive.
Clown like clumsy, a funny position/ pouster in which usually the clowns stand (head downwards and feet
towards the sky) ,and content as you are on your own, in mothers womb when mother can do nothing much for
the baby .feet towards the sky .babys position is up side down before birth in placenta, and skull like
moon ,clear and hairless .Gilled like a fish.not using your lungs .A common sense that if your feet are
towards sky your thumbs(toes) are towards your head in a clumsy ,silly manner (dodo) is considered to be a
clumsy bird. Wrapped in many folds of protective membranes like a cylinder/ Trawling, nesting in dark like an
owl. Here Plath uses the simile of trawl for umbilical cord to show the contact of mother and child. Mute and
quite as a fleshy white/yellow, turnip whose only contact with the earth is its main root (like umbilical cord in
humans), from fourth of July to Fools day. O high riser ever growing, round bread like (another day to
day simile) baby.
Vague, dreamy and enchanting like most waited mail from a far off land. Your top vertebra (Atlas) is bent like a
prawn. You feel safe and at ease. Now next lines describe the birth with the use of many similes surprisingly
only of fish. These all fish are wriggly and slippery and these similes show the condition of newly born baby,
squirmy and writhing and all slippery because of natural fluid on them.
You make ripples and are nervous and jumpy on your birth and ,but are a perfect sum or result .A clean slate.a
record of past events and activities(from conception to birth).With your face forwards toward the world
..children are born this way.
The poem is perhaps about Plaths ex-husband, how he blocked her out and never listened to anything she had
to say. In the second half...it refers to when he had left and she had no idea were he was. The last line of the
poem means her husband has gone on with his life...new faceto the worldand left his past with her, has the
same person only a new beginning.
The clean slate symbolizes innocence, the baby is a new person and so has nothing written in its life thus far.

Morning Song by Sylvia Plath

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.
Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.
Im no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the winds hand.
All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.
One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cats. The window square
Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.

Here I am, writing about Sylvia Plath again. Every time I return to her Ariel poems, I am newly astounded;
the poems are so unique, challenging and rewarding. Morning Song is the first poem in that collection,

and describes a mother waking in the night to tend to her crying baby. As a mother of two, Plath is surely
writing about her own child, her own experience.
The opening line is killer: Love set you going like a fat gold watch. From the outset, it is clear that Time is
to be a prominent theme here. Plath likens her childs birth to the winding of a watch. The implication here
is of course that the watch must eventually wind down, stop; her child will ultimately die. There is a strong
awareness throughout the poem that this baby is on its own life course that it occupies Time in a space
separate from the mother. Plath recognises this in the second verse as she describes the child as a New/
statue./ In a drafty museum. A new statue that will receive its own stains, chips and cracks. Mother, father
and midwife become mere walls, eclipsed by the new life that has just become the most important thing
in the world.
Plath develops this notion of separation in the third, magisterial stanza: Im no more your mother/ Than
the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own/ Slow effacement at the winds hand. What a statement;
this is Plath at her enigmatic, economical finest. The poet is poignantly aware that her child is a separate
entity, and she sees her own mortality reflected in that life.
I love the description in the fifth verse of the mother stumbling from bed at the babys cry, cow-heavy and
floral/ In my Victorian nightgown. Her description of herself here is decidedly unglamorous, dowdy and
functional the sole purpose of her existence now being to nurture and preserve the child. I do not want
to dwell on the idea too much, but I cannot help but notice an apparent parallel between her
child and her poems, in the sense of ones creation becoming an independent entity with its
own agenda. Plath describes her approach to motherhood in much the same way as she
seems to have approached her vocation as a poet. Sylvia Plath famously used to write in the
very early hours of the morning, before dawn, while her children were asleep. Her selfsacrificing dedication to her craft was quite motherly of her, and the poems are (arent
they?) mysteriously out of a poets control once they are written, and seem to have their
own life force
The final lines of the poem are just perfect, and neatly conclude the poem with a sense that the child is
beginning its own, separate journey of life. It tries its handful of notes, the clear vowels rising like
balloons. This is a clear acknowledgement that the child has its own independent voice, will tell its own
story and build its own future. Plath, the mother, is helpless to control that voice or that life. It is not within
her power to censor it.